Nobility is a concept that does not sit easily with democracy. It inherently suggests that there is an order among men; that breeding matters; that all things are not relative. It rejects the grand misconceptions of this age; that all are created equal, that success is only a matter of effort or lack thereof, that no act has consequences. So in this age —to allow those falsities to persist — nobility is defamed.

Nobility lost the war against barbarism.

It is not alone in being a concept that has been defiled not because of what it is, but because the losing side in a war held that concept. Even today, our concept of ‘a noble‘ is a tainted one, and quite distinct from our concept of ‘a noble deed‘. The contrast perhaps between the attainment of the ideal and the imperfect vessels that sought that ideal? But not only that; the residual effects of combat against those who upheld those ideals.

Democracy is by nature the glorification of the ignoble.

We forget this. In the name of democracy, we have broken up the concept of sovereignty and distributed it widely, claiming that sovereignty stems from the people. We have, in erratic fits and starts, continued to remove the barriers to the exercise of sovereignty to the point today where only children and criminals are denied sovereignty. We have no standards: we rejected nobility as a standard; we rejected capacity as a standard; we rejected leadership as a standard. Sovereignty, rather than being reserved to the greatest, has been dispersed amongst the least, with only the base caution not to commit a crime left as restraint.

To recognise nobility is to reject democracy at a foundational level.

The heart of the unthinking, shocked reaction to the introduction of an Australian knightly order is a personal rejection of the principles — and in many cases an absence of the capacity to abide those principles — recognised as necessary to be worthy of that title. A true cultural cringe; a revulsion towards the mere acknowledgement of greatness, knowing that the achievement of that greatness is beyond their scope. Recognising greatness means noticing its lack.